While nature tends to strike a balance between growth & decay, hierarchy and decentralization, there is still a "rebalancing" when they get out of whack. The problem is that, with humans, this "rebalancing" may come in the form of famine, plague, die off, who knows--and even more significantly, humans now exert such influence on the global environment that it is possible for the "rebalancing" of human growth to end all life, or at least all human life. As a selfish human, I'm starting from the proposition that I don't find that kind of rebalancing of nature to be acceptable. I'd rather bring about some kind of proactive rebalancing that restores balance without destroying humans, and better yet, without destroying our desire for "quality of life." That's asking a lot, I realize, but it seems that hierarchy, and especially the dependency that leads to hierarchy, is the best lever for humans to push on with that goal in mind.

I certainly agree that humans tend to seek power, and that this represents a real challenge to any kind of egalitarian "utopia." The ideas of minimal self-sufficiency and anthropological self-awareness are the best solutions to that problem that I can come up with at the moment, but they are certainly imperfect. I don't know if it's practicable to hope for such a "rhizome" structure to become ubiquitous, but I'd settle for it helping to balance out run-away hierarchy, and to balance out civilization's running away from addressing our needs as defined by our ontogeny...

I, too, don't think it follows that growth is an outcome of hierarchy. I think the author is collapsing two distinct phenomena.

Also, personally I am uninterested in eliminating hierarchy. Hierarchies are very efficient ways to organize to produce results. In particular, they allow for accountability, that magical quality of something being "count-able" and thus able to be quantified. Quantification and lines of responsibility for those quantities are what make managing large endeavors possible. There is on the opposite spectrum the "open source" movement or "hive" approach to accomplishing large projects, but even in those systems often you'll find a person or persons at the top who help direct the system as a whole and frequently they have the final call for a proscribed set of decisions.

When done right (and it is done right in many places), individuals perform better when accountability is present. They are clear on their tasks and given the resources (or not, as the case may be) to accomplish them they are able to use their commitment and ingenuity and drive to accomplish them. People who are unclear on their tasks report that they are unsatisfied and frustrated with the system; anyone who has had conflicting directives from an employer will appreciate that.

It's possible to spread accountability across multiple individuals and strictly speaking accountability isn't by definition an individual phenomenon. I can be accountable for the condition of the environment — but so can anyone else and everyone else if they accept by the group the role of being accountable.

But it does take a great deal more effort to manage an endeavor when accountabilities are spread across more people simply because the communication overhead increases to make sure omissions don't occur because each accountable persons thinks that "the other person was handling that." For that reason I will always set up projects (and advise my clients to do the same) where it is quite clear who is accountable for what and for whom — in other words, a hierarchical system.

-André

Perhaps the seduction of hierarchy was the idea of having non-stop growth, with intervals of decay held off by brute, mass force. That's what an irrigation system is, for as long as it can be expanded.

Growth in human population is not a consequence of merely hierarchy. It is a consequence of:
1. hierarchy
2. systemic dependence for support
3. availability and condition of limited resources not yet under human dominion
4. knowledge of the restraining forces
5. complexity

With a human settlement, organization, or culture that experiences growth without hierarchy, problems arise with group management and cohesion when the group size gets larger than 150. After a certain amount of growth without hierarchy, an inability to manage complex intra-group support will cause the group to either collapse or split into separate groups.

When you add durable hierarchy to the system, and its inherent ability to manage and direct large amounts of capital, resources, and "the masses", problems arising from complexity can be addressed through taking in more resources from outside the system, tempered by how much knowledge we have of what is preventing further growth.

For example, until we understood what causes disease, through the development of germ theory, we could not effectively expend resources to combat how predation by bacteria and viruses kept the population from growing faster. Then we learned about heating water, using soap, cooking, refrigerating, and preserving food, antibiotics, vector management with pesticides, and isolation procedures. Now all currently supplied via fossil fuels, with oil being a major component.

The system has to attempt to keep growing because that is the solution that those at the top of the hierarchy keep implementing, as if they know nothing else: more. More technology, more law, more enforcement, more bread, more circuses, more surveillance, more resources, more employment, more profit, more research, more infrastructure, more consumption.

But you're still dependent on the hierarchy growing, whether you're a pedestrian plebeian or an exalted elite. Bill Gates, Condi Rice, and Rupert Murdoch are as dependent on growing the system they manipulate as those that are manipulated.

And each piecemeal, back-end, hierarchical solution to the problem at hand leads to problems elsewhere in the system, which accumulate to be addressed later with another solution that does not address the complex problem. Wash, rinse, repeat.

When lack of either knowledge or resources of the entropic problems leads to a failure of hierarchy, then you see things like product boycotts, strikes, demonstrations, civil unrest, and revolutions.

When a lack of both resources and knowledge leads to a failure of hierarchy, then you see things like war, famine, disease, and collapse.

While tribal populations could support themselves on a few hours of work per person per day, through fossil fuels we expend a few hundred hours of work per person per day. Each member of a tribe has an excellent understanding of the entire tribe's support system, while the overwhelming majority of civilization has no clue of how our system functions.

Our hierarchical growth the last few hundred years was the result of a smattering of knowledge of the forces at play, combined with a massive infusion of energy from fossil fuels.